Continuation of Java

The advent of .Net and C# in the market has been leading to fears that Java as a programming language is losing its relevance. I beg to submit that after having been a witness to procedure driven programming for long my first step into the object oriented world was through Java. Would the knowledge of Java serve as a stepping stone for development in other better, as they are advertised, platform independent and object oriented programming language? I am actually going through a difficult timewhile trying to sharpen my skills in Java and constantly being told that this wave might not last for long.